at an arm’s length: Expanding the Walls 2025 features photography by the fifteen artists in the 2025 cohort of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s signature teen program, Expanding the Walls: Making Connections between Photography, History, and Community. This year marks the program’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

The phrase “at an arm’s length” suggests both physical proximity and emotional reserve, a desire to be close, yet the need to distance oneself. The artists in this exhibition capture a cautious intimacy shaped by the bittersweet edges of adolescence, exploring what it means to be in community while choosing what to share and what to hold close.

Using techniques such as soft focus and black-and-white imagery to obscure detail and evoke a sense of timelessness, the images resist easy legibility. The works in at an arm’s length invite others to consider what it means to look without fully knowing.

This exhibition will be available online at expandingthewalls.studiomuseum.org on July 29, 2025. 

Founded in 2001, Expanding the Walls supports the photographic practices of teenage artists based in New York City through workshops, gallery visits, and discussions led by contemporary artists. For over twenty years, the archive of renowned Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) has been the program’s central inspiration. Over the course of the free eight-month program, the young artists also engage with the work of photographers such as Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Texas Isaiah, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems. These artists, alongside Van Der Zee, provide a rich intergenerational dialogue in which the teens can situate their work and practices.